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Why LinkedIn Has No Competitors
A growth case study of LinkedIn's features and its dominance in professional social media and networking.
Olabinjo Adeniran
March 31, 2025
In partnership with
LinkedIn is not often discussed because it’s a pretty serious place. With over 1 billion users, it is the most important professional network. In today’s growth case study, I’ll examine LinkedIn’s growth, how it became a social media platform, and why no other platform comes to mind when we think about LinkedIn.
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Now let’s study LinkedIn supremacy. As always, feel free to skip to sections that interest you.
Table of Contents
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a social media platform tailored for professionals to connect. Professionals use it for career advancement, job hunting, and networking opportunities in business. The platform enables users to highlight their skills, experience, and achievements.
For businesses, LinkedIn provides marketing and sales services, enabling them to create marketing and sales campaigns to reach prospective buyers. Businesses can also use LinkedIn’s recruiting solutions to find and hire talent.
LinkedIn - Origin Story and Success
Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant founded LinkedIn on May 5th, 2003.
In 2011, it went public with over 100 million users, offering its stock on the NYSE at a valuation of $4.5 billion.
In 2016, Microsoft Acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, bringing the world’s largest professional network with over 300 million users to the world’s largest workplace software provider.
Today, under Jeff Weiner's leadership, LinkedIn leads a diversified business with revenues from membership subscriptions, advertising sales, and recruitment solutions. LinkedIn has more than 6,000 full-time employees and offices in 30 cities worldwide. It has grown to over 1 billion registered users from over 200 countries and territories worldwide.
How does LinkedIn Make Money? - LinkedIn Products and Services
LinkedIn categorises its products and services into five groups:
Talent Solutions - Helping businesses hire the best people and helping the best people find jobs.
Marketing Solutions - Helping businesses advertise to professionals who use LinkedIn
Sales Solutions - Helping businesses build lead generation activity and introduce their services to LinkedIn users
Learning - LinkedIn provides access to over 20,000 courses with professional tests, examinations and certifications.
Premium—LinkedIn offers premium features for individual customers and businesses, giving them more data about their connections, followers, and page visitors.
The company charges various fees for these features and had revenue of $16.37 billion in fiscal year 2024.
LinkedIn didn’t always have social media functionality. It started as a jobs and professional networking platform. Sometime in 2010, it copied Twitter and allowed some users to post a short blurb of 140 characters with the option to attach a link. This feature was called “Network Activity”. The feature even supported auto-posting to Twitter itself.
In 2012, LinkedIn allowed specific influencers to create long-form posts. Former American President Barack Obama and Virgin Atlantic Founder Richard Branson were among the few business leaders with access to this feature. Users could follow these leaders' pages to read more posts.
In 2013, LinkedIn bought publishing platform Pulse for $90M and said it wanted to be the definitive professional platform. Here’s a quote from Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience at the time:
“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”
By 2014, LinkedIn opened publishing to all users, but several people didn’t like it. In this 2015 blog post, a user complains about the new publishing and other features. LinkedIn became like other social media apps (particularly Facebook), allowing users to post, like, comment, and share—these features differentiated it from other professional networks. The product’s home page was now a feed of activity and posts.
In an announcement article, Reuters journalist Gerry Shih compares LinkedIn to Facebook:
LinkedIn Corp is attempting to become more like Facebook Inc by encouraging all members to generate a steady stream of shareable articles, a perk once available only to well-known business personalities. The move, which the company hopes will generate more interest in the site, comes two weeks after LinkedIn disclosed that page views slipped for the second consecutive quarter.
From the quotes above, we can infer that LinkedIn was useful; however, it lacked content to encourage users to return. The key to a sustainable social network is not just users, it’s new content so users can return.
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Metcalfe's Law and Network Effects
At this point, LinkedIn is successful by all definitions, but it has begun to lose page views. This is a bad thing for a business based on attention. Before we study how LinkedIn solves this problem, let’s take a walk back to before social media existed.
In 1980, Robert Metcalfe invented Ethernet - a cable system that connects computers to form a local area network and, by expansion, a wide area network. While presenting this to his colleagues at his firm, 3Com, Metcalfe stated the following:
The financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2).
This statement is now called Metcalfe’s Law, but how does this impact LinkedIn?
When LinkedIn opened its platform to user-generated content in 2015, it already had nearly 400 million users. Each new user who joins any social network contributes value not only to their own experience but also to the experiences of all existing users within that network. This mutual benefit lies at the heart of network effects - a term that describes Metcalfe's Law in businesses and social networks like LinkedIn.
Before including media, LinkedIn hosted one of the most successful social networks in the world. It had a valuable network of professionals globally, and each professional filled out their work profile, updating jobs, titles and employers accordingly. But these professionals did not post content.
Describing LinkedIn pre-2015 as a “social network” and not “social media” might lead to some confusion. The term “network” carries much weight here because LinkedIn was not yet a “social media” platform. Yes, its users could connect, but there was little utility beyond introductions, applying to jobs, and messaging. LinkedIn needed to include the “media” part of “social media” to grow user activity and improve user value.
Becoming a social media company cemented LinkedIn’s status as the top platform for professionals compared to other professional networking and job platforms. Users could now write and share content about their work - anything from managing teams, hiring top performers, and building the best brand. Other users could read them, react, share, and provide feedback. Like Gerry Shih noted above, LinkedIn applied Facebook behaviour to its social network and built new features for professionals.
LinkedIn could build other services and features now that it was more social. After buying Pulse, LinkedIn acquired two more companies, notably Lynda.com for $1.5 billion to include Lynda’s learning content in the social media platform. It also bought Refresh.io to help improve users’ connections based on their profile, events, or the industry.
In June 2016, Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. This was the much-needed firepower that the company needed. Microsoft is the world’s largest workplace software provider. LinkedIn could leverage Microsoft’s knowledge, skills, expertise, network, and resources.
After Microsoft’s acquisition, LinkedIn acquired more companies to bolster its technology and offerings. It acquired Fliptop and PointDrive to improve LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Connectifier to improve recruitment offerings for recruiters and companies, Glint, an employee survey and retention tool, Drawbridge to build better marketing tools for professional networks, and Oribi for better marketing analytics.
LinkedIn has also acquired SlideShare, ESaya, Rapportive, IndexTank, Connected and Cardmunch.
LinkedIn’s Competitive Landscape
LinkedIn’s acquisitions and new features broaden its competitive landscape. If a software or business connects businesses to professionals in any way or form, it’s probably a LinkedIn competitor. This includes but is not limited to professional marketing analytics, sales tools, recruiting platforms, and professional communities.
This section is awkward because this case study seeks to explain why LinkedIn has no competitors. The short answer is that it depends on how you define competition; the long answer is this case study.
In the image below, I’ve divided LinkedIn competition into two broad groups: jobs platforms (like Monster.com, Indeed, and Welcome to the Jungle) and professional networks or communities (like Superpath, Blind, and any other professional community you can think of).
The diagram shows how LinkedIn stacks up against these two broad groups.
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Why competing with LinkedIn is difficult
LinkedIn’s feature set and social network make it difficult to compete with. It provides its users a wide range of services and has the largest network of professional users worldwide, covering every social demographic and industry.
Going against a social media behemoth like LinkedIn is not only resource-intensive, it is cost-intensive.
TikTok’s rise is one example of a new player competing against established social media platforms (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook) to increase its user base. However, TikTok’s growth is driven by its unique approach to social media and its over $ 1 billion annual advertising expenditure between 2018 and 2022. It spent as much as $3 million in the US daily to acquire new users.
To quote media strategist Eric Seufert:
While it’s probably true that no other company has spent so much, so quickly on user acquisition, it seems odd to point to that strategy now as something of a startling, sleeper success. The fact that ByteDance spent aggressively on user acquisition to grow TikTok has been common knowledge for years: at one point, the company spent an estimated $3MM per day on acquisition marketing in the United States alone, and the company is purported to have spent roughly $1BN on advertising over the course of 2018.
Before TikTok, Google+ was another unique social media platform with a wealthy backer and an absurd acquisition budget. In 2011, Google+ was everywhere online and offline—its parent company, Google, increased advertising spending for the year to $213 million, which wasn’t enough. Google+ eventually failed and shut down in April 2019.
Conclusion - So why does LinkedIn have no competitors?
To battle social media incumbents, a company needs a new media or networking format, a lot of cash, and perfect timing.
LinkedIn has a significant first mover advantage, having launched in 2003 as one of the early professional networks on the web. It follows Metcalfe's law, effectively leveraging this network, which has allowed it to grow to 1 billion users in over 20 years. The platform has built various utilities on top of its network, further entrenching its dominance with features such as Jobs, Recruiting, Social Feed, Sales, Marketing & Advertising, Learning Solutions, and Games. Additionally, creating anything comparable to LinkedIn is prohibitively expensive and even more costly to acquire users.
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